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Sunday, June 9, 2013

Let it never be said that printing isn't rock and roll. A home-made YouTube video, produced by an inventive fan of melancholic rockers Radiohead, has opened people's minds to the hidden talents of an Epson LX-81 dot matrix printer.

James Houston, a Glasgow School of Art graduate, employs the defunct model's otherwise unremarkable din to replicate the drum beat in Nude, a track from Radiohead's In Rainbows.

It joins a host of obsolete 1980s hardware, including a Sinclair ZX Spectrum computer, a Hewlett-Packard ScanJet and an array of exposed hard drives which impressively recreate Thom Yorke's vocals.

Houston's Big Ideas: Don't Get Any has received more than 250,000 hits on YouTube and a wealth of praise. Despite this, he remains modest, telling Creative Review: 'I'm a video maker and not a musician, this has grown out of control.'

At this point, Post Script considered inviting readers to send in recordings from their own presses. Frankly, though, the thought of trying to detect Mandy by Barry Manilow in the churnings of a Manroland would be too much for anyone to take.